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A Role That's Hard to Shake Off: The 9/11 Antihero

IN a backstage dressing room with the amenities of a prison cell, minus the toilet, Liev Schreiber sits by himself, postmatinee, as if in solitary confinement. He has the haunted air of a man recovering from a nasty experience. His costume is off. His street clothes are on. But still he sits. Sigourney Weaver, his co-star in Neil LaBute's harrowing play, ''The Mercy Seat,'' is already headed for the door, husband and daughter in tow.

She doesn't bother saying goodbye. She and Mr. Schreiber, cast as adulterous, and decidedly nonheroic, lovers trysting in a downtown loft when terrorists destroy the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, will relock theatrical horns in a couple of hours. Weekends are debilitating. Four shows. Four rounds of emotional terrorism waged in the name of romance.

Trouble is, ''the stink,'' as Mr. Schreiber so indelicately puts it, of his part is lingering; same thing happened when he portrayed the bad guy in the Public Theater's Iago-centric rendition of ''Othello'' to critical trills. Mr. Schreiber, recipient of a 1992 M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama, hasn't had a bad review lately, but remembers John Simon's once referring to him as ''the somnambulistic Liev Schreiber.'' He looked it up in the dictionary. Nobody calls him somnambulistic anymore.

Mr. Schreiber is no Method actor, but he's having trouble getting away from this Ben Harcourt role. ''Doing this part, I feel, well, shadier,'' he says. ''Not that I'm doing anything shady. It's like trying to shake off an itch that's not really there.''

The character hangover doesn't recede until he's received an unconditional hug. From his dog. Such a relief, after a Sunday matinee he describes as ''rough,'' that his extroverted Jack Russell terrier, Chicken, is a standing ovation on four legs.

For the past hundred minutes inside the Acorn Theater, where this sold-out passion play has been extended through Jan. 15, Mr. Schreiber has played a human rat in a maze of his own making. What sort of man views the World Trade Center tragedy as a chance to fake his death, leave his wife and children, and scamper off with his boss/lover?

Before he has the energy to talk about it, Mr. Schreiber, 35 and single, decides he needs food and a scenery change. On goes a knit skullcap -- nice disguise -- and across the street we jaywalk, sans Chicken, to the Westbank Cafe. He experiences momentary menu ambivalence, ambivalence being a trait he shares with Ben, then asserts himself: shiraz, squash soup, portobellos atop polenta, and steak au poivre flanked by fries and spinach.

''I'm turning into Orson Welles,'' marvels Mr. Schreiber, whose role as Mr. Welles in an HBO film received an Emmy nomination. The ad lib gets the desired reaction: the bread basket arrives immediately. At a brawny 6-foot-3, Mr. Schreiber, whose previous glory days unfurled at Brooklyn Tech, captaining a championship football squad, does all the carbo-loading he wants. Besides, he and Chicken bicycled to work from their NoHo home.

He accepted the ''Mercy Seat'' role, which pays $275 a week (he finances his theater habit by doing television voiceovers and films including the ''Scream'' series), after Mr. LaBute's first choice, Aaron Eckhart, proved unavailable. And after his agent advised him against it. The play, he says, is less about Sept. 11 than about the survival or failure of relationships, a subject that intrigues him.

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''I thought it seemed like a hard part, and I like hard problems,'' he said. ''I like tough nuts. I feel like I am one. It's like, if I can spare him an ounce of sympathy, then I can spare myself a pound.''

SPOKEN like a veteran of therapy: has he been? ''I have,'' he says, dunking bread in his soup.

Why did he think he needed it?

''I had knee surgery,'' he says, deadpan. ''Oh, you mean psychotherapy! I don't think I need therapy now, no. I'm very normal, I think. I mean, I'm not very normal, but I'm normal enough that I don't need therapy.''

But there was a time when he partook? ''I like the whole philosophy of 'don't be so hard on yourself,' '' he admits.

Sure, he'd like to be a nice Hollywood leading man. ''But nice, happy guys tend to be like, you know, sort of handsome leading man guys, and I never really nailed that market,'' he says. ''I also think nice, happy guys aren't usually that interesting. What do I know about nice, happy guys? If I felt nice and happy, I'd shoot myself. I wouldn't have to live anymore. 'I'm nice and happy: O.K., stop here.' Oh boy, I'm gonna get myself in trouble.'' His steak arrives; end of soliloquy.

Mr. Schreiber grew up poor on New York's Lower East Side. He was 4 when his mother left his father, a would-be actor; she drove a cab, and they moved around a lot. His role model was his maternal grandfather, a Ukrainian immigrant who drove a meat delivery truck, played the cello and taught him tennis. Mr. Schreiber was trying a screenplay about their relationship when he read Jonathan Safran Foer's hit novel, ''Everything Is Illuminated,'' and decided Mr. Foer had done it better. He wrote a screenplay adaptation, and next month his foray into directing begins with a search for locations in Ukraine. He's jazzed.

Out on the sidewalk, Mr. Schreiber forgets to reapply his skullcap and is collared by a fan. She tells him he's wonderful in ''The Mercy Seat.'' He seems pleased. It must be nice to have complete strangers tell you you're wonderful. ''And even nicer,'' he says, sliding back into character, ''when they tell you in front of a journalist.''

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A version of this article appears in print on January 8, 2003, on Page B00002 of the National edition with the headline: A Role That's Hard to Shake Off: The 9/11 Antihero. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe